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Governor Antonio De Noli and His Family in the Cape Verde Islands and Portugal: Discoverers, Colonizers, and Governors, 1460-1704

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Governor Antonio De Noli and His Family in the Cape Verde Islands and Portugal: Discoverers, Colonizers, and Governors, 1460-1704 Research Bulletin of the Antonio de Noli Academic Society . Genoa, Italy, 2010. Vol. 2, Nr 8, p. 132 -186 Governor Antonio de Noli and His Family in the Cape Verde Islands and Portugal: Discoverers, Colonizers, and Governors, 1460-1704 By: Professor Trevor Hall, Ph.D. Member of the Antonio de Noli Academic Society Introduction One generation before Christopher Columbus saw America, a mariner named Antonio de Noli sailed from the Genoa region of Italy into the Atlantic Ocean where de Noli discovered the uninhabited Cape Verde Islands off the coast of West Africa around 1460 (map ). Two years later he colonized them and ruled the insular colony until 1476, as a governor working for the Portuguese royal family. In that year, 1476, Spanish troops invaded the Cape Verde Islands and captured Governor de Noli. They took him to Spain, as a prisoner of war, but King Ferdinand of Spain freed the governor. Following his release Governor Antonio de Noli disappeared and was never seen again, but his family continued to live and prosper in the Cape Verde Islands. 132 Although Governor Antonio de Noli left no writings, his journeys to West Africa, along with those of his extended family are stored in archives across Portugal and Spain. Manuscripts about the de Noli family include fifteenth century Portuguese and Spanish royal edicts, travel narratives, royal chronicles, maps, and genealogical records. Economic data about the early de Noli family can also be found in fiscal records of revenues collected by the Portuguese government and the Catholic Church, when de Noli merchants paid taxes in the Cape Verde Islands. Some de Noli family members paid import taxes to the Portuguese government and the Catholic Church when they transported human captives and merchandise from West Africa to the Cape Verde Islands in the early 1500s. Other family members paid property taxes in the Cape Verde Islands. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the de Noli family members were wealthy and their names appear in various Cape Verde and Catholic Church tax receipts. 1 Some de Noli family members made their money legally through real estate and shipping. The governor’s family owned the best lands in the Cape Verde Islands, and had plantations that grew cotton and sugar cane worked by enslaved Africans. The family also owned a number of ships that transported merchants and their cargo to and from Portugal, the Cape Verde Islands, and near-by West Africa. In 1472, however, some members of the de Noli clan made a lot of money illegally when they sailed their own ships from the Cape Verde Islands to trade on the Gold Coast of modern-day Ghana. The de Noli clan made a fortune in Gold Coast gold. Governor Antonio de Noli and his family hid their immense wealth from people in Europe, and spent some of the gold purchasing privacy. It was easy during the fifteenth century for ship-owning men who lived on distant tropical Atlantic islands, far from Europe to remain anonymous. It is possible the first de Noli ship captains lived aboard their vessels when they left the Cape Verde Islands. Some ship captains really did not like land, and in the tropics, others went ashore mainly during the cooler nights. The northern Italian de Noli clan may not have enjoyed the hot tropical sun. During this epoch, people carried no picture identification, no passport. There were no immigration agencies, and no personal identification cards—especially for Italian mariners living on Portuguese islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The difficulty of ascertaining a person’s true 1 Two Cape Verde customs receipt books list members of the de Noli family as paying taxes to the Portuguese government and the Catholic church. The first is dated 1513-1516 and the second 1528. Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Nucleo Antigo, livro 757, and Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Nucleo Antigo, livro 528, for the year 1528. 133 identity in Early Modern Europe is seen in mid sixteenth century France where an imposter assumed Martin Guerre’s identity, and fooled his family, his friends and even wife, before being exposed as an imposter. 2 This study begins with Antonio de Noli, patriarch of the Atlantic branch of the de Noli family tree, during the second half of the fifteenth century. The adventure started a little before 1460 when de Noli sailed from northern Italy to Spain, Portugal, Madeira, the Canaries and West Africa. He discovered the uninhabited Cape Verde Islands and colonized them for his family and a prince in Portugal. In 1477 Governor de Noli vanished, but his family continued to live in the Cape Verdes. Part 2 of the study reconstructs the lives of family members who lived in the Cape Verdes with Governor de Noli. They include his younger brother Bartholomeu and their nephew Raphael de Noli. All three men sailed from Italy to Portugal around 1460. Each of the original three de Noli men owned and captained their own ship. Each vessel had its own crew consisting of young able bodied Italian men. Part 3 concentrates on the daughter of Governor Antonio de Noli, a Portuguese noblewoman named Dona Branca de Aguiar. She inherited her father’s Cape Verde governorship in 1497, but received her noble title from her Portuguese mother, Dona de Aguiar or from the king of Portugal. During the early sixteenth century, the governess and other second-generation de Noli family members lived in the Cape Verde Islands and were rich, powerful Portuguese nobles who governed the islands and controlled the maritime economy. The fourth part of this study looks at another de Noli ship captain, Andre de Noli, who lived in the Cape Verde Islands from the 1550s to 1630s. His name was mis- transcribed as Andre Donelha, probably by a seventeenth-century archivist working at the library, Biblioteca da Ajuda, in Portugal. In 1625 Andre de Noli edited his diary which presented a detailed autobiographical narrative about his maritime adventures in the Cape Verde Islands and near-by West Africa. He signed the diary, which helps to identify the author as a member of the de Noli family. The diary provides data about the first Cape Verde governor Antonio de Noli, and other family members, who lived a century before him. Additional historical manuscripts about de Noli family members are scattered in archives and libraries across Portugal and its former colonies in Madeira and the Cape Verde 2 Natalie Z. Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). 134 Islands. However, the oldest manuscripts are found in Portugal, and not in the former colonies. Many members of the de Noli family were Portuguese nobles, and the nobility kept extensive written genealogical records. To be a Portuguese noble meant that one had noble parents and grandparents, who were also nobles. However, this was not the case of nobles in the de Noli family, whose parents and grandparents were not recorded in genealogical records. There is no explanation for this lack of protocol, but it is important, and is very rare. The truth may hide a family secret, perhaps by explaining the de Noli’s rapid upward mobility into the elite Portuguese nobility. It is especially difficult to explain the rise of the family after Bartholomeu de Noli murdered a priest in 1466 and his older brother Governor Antonio de Noli committed treason against Portugal in 1477—but, be that as it may, these crimes did not stop the upward mobility of the de Noli clan in the Cape Verde Islands. A major hurdle in reconstructing the de Noli family history in the Cape Verde Islands during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is the difficulty in reading the original Portuguese manuscripts written during those years (see the appendix for an example of sixteenth-century Portuguese). To read fifteenth-sixteenth-, and even some seventeenth- century Portuguese manuscripts one requires training in Portuguese paleography—the interpretation of ancient written Portuguese manuscripts. Early Modern Portuguese scribes had difficult to read handwriting that was filled with numerous abbreviations and multiple symbols. Modern dictionaries of Portuguese paleography provide meanings for ancient Portuguese words, abbreviations, and symbols. 3 Early Modern Portuguese had no standardized spelling, and each scribe wrote a word as it sounded to him. A foreign name, like de Noli, had as many different spellings as the Portuguese scribes who wrote it down. Modern researchers not versed in Portuguese paleography must rely on transcribed, edited, and published Portuguese manuscripts. When the published manuscript has an error, scholars repeat the error over and over, because they cannot read the original manuscript. The fifth and final section of this study looks at two de Noli family members, one who was a German noble in the Portuguese Cape Verde Islands, and another who was a Cape Verdean author, in early eighteenth century. Since the Cape Verde Islands was a small colony, there were not enough eligible Portuguese nobles to 3 E. Borges Nunes, Abreviatvras Paleograficas Portvgvesas (Lisboa: FL., 1981). 135 marry each other. Thus, Portuguese, Italian and German noble families intermarried in the islands. Noble families who governed different Portuguese insular colonies in the Azores, Madeiras, Cape Verdes and Sao Tome were also linked by marriage. This brief study is a collective-biography of the Italian discoverer Antonio de Noli and his extended family, which lived mainly in the Cape Verde Islands from the 1460s to 1704. The study follows the de Noli clan on their maritime adventures from native Italy to Spain, Portugal, Madeira, the Canaries, West Africa and especially the Cape Verde Islands—decades before and after Columbus sailed the Atlantic Ocean.
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